Robert Fromberg
Editor-in-Chief, HFMA
One of the nice things about the Internet is the way it allows old friends to reconnect. The other day, I received an email message from a friend I knew 30 years ago. We had been roommates on the lower east side of Manhattan, where he still lives and works as a musician and comedian.
Getting his message reminded me of a story about him--a story that I believes applies especially well to health care.
I had recently arrived in New York from the Midwest, and my friend and I were eating at a down-at-the-heels coffee shop in our neighborhood. We had finished our meal, and my friend wanted dessert.
As the waiter approached, my friend said to me, "Watch this."
He turned to the waiter and said, enunciating very clearly, "I would like a glazed doughnut, please."
The waiter stared at him blankly. "Huh?"
My friend repeated the request, but this time in the most hurried mumble imaginable--"I wana gla do."
To which the waiter replied, "Oh, sure," and went to get the order.
I couldn't believe that the waiter could not understand the perfectly enunciated version and that he could understand the, to me, unintelligible mumble.
One lesson was that I wasn't in the Midwest anymore. The more important lesson was that effective communication requires communicating in a way that the recipient considers clear; whether the person delivering the information thinks it's clear is not so important.
HFMA's PATIENT FRIENDLY BILLING project encourages clear, correct, concise, patient-friendly financial communication. And although I wouldn't recommend that patient registration or billing office staff be trained in the art of the lower east side mumble, this story is an extreme example that you may be surprised how often your own choice of words and way of presenting those words--although entirely understandable to you--is not "friendly" to others.
